Posts Tagged: literature
Herbjørg Wassmo
Herbjørg Wassmo - The picture is from The Royal Library, www.kb.dk
I remember reading about a girl, Tora, who lives in a small, shabby island community in the northern part of Norway with her mother and stepfather in the 1950’s. She is a ‘tyskerunge’ and this has great consequence for her. The hatred towards Germany is great after WWII, and any sign left of the occupation is unwelcome. Tora is bullied, her stepfather abuses her and her mother is struggling with herself and survival. Tora must find ways to survive or get by in life in spite of the adversity.
It was one of my favorite books growing up. I was intrigued by this term and what lay behind it. It was also another entry point to WWII, which I had knowledge of as a war, but not so much what kind of consequences faced a big part of the world both during and after.
Later on, Wassmo wrote about Dina, which was so popular it was made into a movie called ‘I am Dina’. And now Wassmo is out with ‘Hundre år’ (A hundred years). She joins the ranks of novel writers exploring the generational tale with the recount of the women in her family. The book is definitely on my to-buy list, maybe I’ll even go nuts tonight and buy it in the bookstore and get it autographed 🙂
The Book Thief
Bedtime reading for this month has been The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.
The Book Thief - Mark Zusak
The narrator is Death himself, seeing color where death occurs and taking a liking to a little girl named Liesel, who lives with foster parents at Himmel (did anyone say loaded?) Street. Through Death we learn about Liesel’s life. Her constant nightmares about her dead brother leads to a bonding session with her stepfather, who helps her in her struggle to learn to read well. Her mother (the communist) who has ‘disappeared’ and the boy next door who craves a kiss from her. All is set in and around WWII, where people are acting strange, children are being punished by terrified parents for smearing themselves with charcoal in an attempt to imitate the great Jesse Owens, or displaying negative feelings about Hitler in public.
The narration as interference
The point that Death is the narrator is interesting. He is not an intrusive narrator in the classical sense as the one butting in on every sentence, knowing it all and letting the reader know his omnipotence. He knows everything and remarks it at times, but mostly he is someone who hovers over the story and gives tips and tiny remarks at selected areas. I am partial to stories that have historical footnotes, tidbits and ‘did-you-know-facts’ inserted in novels. I like the humane, not too artsy, feeling a story gets when you actually place it in context and the narration itself makes an investment in the story. One other such book I think of here is Junot Díaz’ ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’. Here the footnotes are a big part of the story. Normally it is a mantra ‘If it is a sentence put it in the text’, but Díaz uses footnotes as a way to interfere with a reading process that is linear, by breaking it off at places, introducing historical facts, character descriptions, cultural references and slang explanations. I am no expert, but I do see these kind of techniques more and more in modern and post-modern works and am leaning towards the attitude the reader has taken to books in modern era.
The increasing fast pace in daily activities has spread its wings out on literature as well. We read faster, more disperse, scan pages looking for buzzwords, and don’t really take time to think the story through until after we have read it and can contemplate its effect while multitasking other activities. And mostly literature allows you to do so. A lot of reading material is almost meant for quick consumption, think later. And this is where, as I see it, the literature with commentary (in lack of a more termish term!) does its best at breaking the reader into bits. Like saying ‘if you can’t concentrate on this, you will have missed something. Read me!!’, or ‘hey man, slow down, where’s the fire?’ In no way is this technique THE way of interfering with a fast reader, but it is a very ‘in-your-face’ technique. I know I have a very conservative way of thinking when it comes to books, but I can’t stand to read something just to fill the hours in a day. Excuse my french, but hell no! Books/literature can be many things, used in a number of ways and with different stances, but I just feel: if you are going to write/read a book that is just over in 2 hours, leaves no impression but an ‘hmm’ and uses valuable tree resources just to keep the book industry alive, then why bother? (but wait, will you not care when it is electronic? Well, yes and no, the book will still be crap, but no trees were harmed, and it is as simple as ‘Delete’ to wish the bad experience away, PLUS the attitude ‘wade through shit to get to the good part’ seems to be a self-maintained factor in literature.)
That special power
The Book Thief is now a quarter read. Liesel has just discovered one of her stepmother’s customers’ library and I feel kinship with her enthusiasm for the book and all it stands for. The book also introduces the incredible power a book can have when it does have something to say. The burning of books is a violent symbolic action, but also very half-thought impulsion. The thought process doesn’t go away if you burn the physical entity. Granted, it can impair the spreading of said thoughts, giving it a royal kick in the funsies. But in other areas it can be the exact royal kick in the funsies that literature needed. It is often said that great art is to be found in recession. An inclination towards the struggle and pain being positives and joy and uncomplicated life acting as negative counterparts. As long as one remembers not to revel in sorrow, but remember that the struggle is in fact to get to some kind of unity and meaning.
Exams: oh how I am going to miss you, the stress and the crammed-into-the-last-few-days-creativity
Deadlines are coming up real fast, and I am getting nostalgic about something that doesn’t have the proper distance in time to deserve being called a nostalgia, since I am right in the process, or actually not even started. Yes it is the exam, the nerve-wrecking, yet exhilarating time of the year when all you knowledge in one micro(yet strangely feeling very macro at the time)subject is being put to the test. How do you organise it, structure you paper or oral exam, how do you keep cool, calm and collected. I personally can first be structured and organised when I have enough little time to spur me on, but not too much time to make me lazy. Don’t get me wrong, I like simmering a topic for months and months on end, but it’s all in my head and doing all sorts of quirky shortcuts and elaborations before I get it on paper and finish it.
This year I am taking two courses, one on Strategic Communication and one on Modern Chinese Literature. And the strangest thing about it; I can’t agree with people who are almost ready to take over the university and declare exams as a thing of the past. The university, like many other workplaces, expect to see some results from the investments they put in the semester, and I do believe that you become a more diverse thinker in the process. I am however not always in agreement with the end result being the most important, on the contrary – the best thing about the exam is the process, the way you tackle the time, the effort you put into it, and the other events and people who inevitably demand your time as well. There is always the risk, for instance at an oral exam, that the nerves get the best of you and all the hard work you have put into it goes out the window. There is also always some numskull who hasn’t followed one single class, or done anything other than intensify coffee consumption at lectures, who walks away, acing the whole lot every single time, while you scramble notes, thoughts and work in a puree of meltdownish actions of panic.
Anyways, to get back to my exams – I am psyched. I got ideas (too many of them), time, place, creativity, I am on the top of the motherblipping game. I brainstorm, scribble, read, feel the university saga of academia running through my veins, I am Student!! I guess it is the hope of hitting the mother of all exams, the one where nothing is left unsaid, no stone unturned, no question unanswered. Expectations are high, but so are standards. I stand with great anticipation at the doorstep of another great challenge in academia.
Wish me luck…
“Everybody was beating each other up. The whole neighborhood was a war zone.”
Sumobrothers, p.15 (Danish version here)
In my opinion, Ramsland’s ‘Sumobrothers’ can be divided into two.
Section 1: a little more than half of the book. Totally submerged in physical and emotional violence, sadism, sexual assaults, brutal parents, lacking parents, frustrated parents, frustrated children, and last but not least a whole pile of brutal children without an off-switch of any kind.
Section 2: around the last third of the book. Ramsland is himself getting tired of all the violence, and doesn’t really know anymore which kinds of perversity and misery he can dish up without it getting trite. So he resorts to an emotional revelation concerning the state of things when everything is so submerged in violence, seen from the perspective of a child.
Ramsland’s literary style is very intriguing. He sticks to, most of the time, a naive style (something like Norwegian Erlend Loe) that supports the fact that we are seeing these experiences through a child. Or how a grown up would imagine the thoughts of a child would be formed in sentences. And that is in it self a scary perspective. Because there is nothing naive or childish about the experiences that are being narrated. There is no sign of a happy family, or a happy childhood, it is actually very hard to even find one single happy day in the entire book. The style corroborates in showing the brutality these children are captured in.
Having said that; I have written notes while reading the book, both in the shape of impressions and quotes. And when I read them through and think about the whole of the book and its message, I must say that it borders on splatter movie technique. The apparently regulated, but in reality totally unmotivated brutality and sadism that is going on between children, children to animals, parents to children, children to parents etc., is way over the top. I am genuinely scared that I am reading an instructions manual on how to raise sociopaths. I am, to say the least, surprised that half of the characters don’t perish during these 255 pages of violence. And this leads me to believe that Ramsland, when it comes to the subject of violence (no matter who it is against, or in which context), is making light of the seriousness of a violent environment. It is really not necessary to have 34 chapters on how everyone is beating everyone with the most innovative techniques to convince the reader, that violence is an incredibly subversive factor i any society. The physical exposition of the novel appears almost without reflection. Only now and then the narrators angst and reflections come to the surface, and we are truly being introduced to what goes on in the head of someone who plays tennis with a toad for a ball.
It is in all fairness a good novel that becomes too obsessed with the concreteness of violence description, because the stories that are behind all this violence are worth telling. There is the depressive dad, who has given up the life of an artist in order to becoming a traveling shoelace salesman and ‘dead-beat dad’. The frustrated mother, who is rejected by her sons solely on the basis of being the stable parent. And last but not least the children, who are only trying to find out what is going on between every unsaid action and where/how they fit in. I want to read more about that. But please turn down the violence a bit.
And the winner is…
It pays to be totally maniacal when it comes to checking websites that give ‘free’ stuff away. Last week I was quick enough to be one of the five fastest to volunteer at DR’s Testklubben to review ‘Sumobrødre‘ by Morten Ramsland. The prize? One copy of the book, free of charge. Score! I am starting on it today, and on the 22nd it will be introduced on ‘Smagsdommerne’ (a review program on DR2), and the site will open up for reviews.
The only other time I have won something was when I was about 15. It was a copy of MJ’s ‘Blood on the Dance Floor’, and I was over the moon with excitement. I didn’t even remember entering the contest, and the feeling of receiving something by a chance draw is really special. It’s a gift, but a gift from someone you don’t know, and only because you actively did something. But you did something, and it paid off. High five myself, applause from the audience and an inner smile for the rest of the day. Lovely!
Back to the book: I will be posting my (translated) review of the book on my blog as soon as I finish it. (And here it is)
Ramsland - Sumobrøde
Just as an initial comment; I don’t like the cover. And it has nothing to do with the giant toad, which I actually find charming, or the font (Minion, to you font lovers out there). Due to poor photography skills I have not been able to capture just how yellow the cover is, but I can assure you, it is mighty yellow. Screaming neon yellow to narrow it down a bit. And it hurts my eyes when I try to read the bloody letters because they are baby blue and black, and… so many contrasts, but hopefully my only concern regarding this book.
I have previously read ‘Hundehoved’ by the same author, and keeping in with the times of family narration, the generation saga, it was really well written. So there you are!
I am on a mission: two days, 255 pages, 1 review report and a, until further notice, sufficient amount of coffee to keep me going.
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